1. Michel Foucault's definition of the subject as "not the speaking consciousness, not the author of the formulation, but a position that may be filled in certain conditions by various individuals" helps us see that individuals are positioned and shaped by the symbolic orders they inhabit. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 115.

2. I do not appeal to the authority of experience for this study's foundation. Because experience is a constructed and historical category, to make substantive claims that rely upon its presumed self-evidence and immediacy is to deny the reality of social mediation. Joan W. Scott quite rightly observes that "when experience is taken as the origin of knowledge . . . questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured—about language (or discourse) and history—are left aside. . . . It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience" ("The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 [Summer 1991]: 777, 779). But she also emphasizes that we need the concept of experience and might agree with Diana Fuss's observation that "while experience can never be a reliable guide to the real, this is not to preclude any role at all for experience in the realm of knowledge production'' ( Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference [New York: Routledge, 1989], 118). Teresa de Lauretis suggests that experience should be defined not in terms of transparent immediacy but rather as the "process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed," and it is this definition, which emphasizes the historical and mediated dimensions of experience, upon which this study relies ( Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984], 559).

3. In "Toward a Female Sublime" ( Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism , ed. Linda Kauffman [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 191-212) Patricia Yaeger defines the female sublime as a particular mode of women's writing. Affirming the woman writer's ability to adopt a mode of writing previously employed by men to establish the preeminence of their identity in society and literature, she proposes a female version of the traditionally male romantic sublime. Adopting Weiskel's notion of a transcendent sublime, Yaeger envisions the female sublime as a mode of empowerment through which the woman writer

can invent, for women, a vocabulary of ecstasy and empowerment, a new way of reading female experience," and sets out to investigate "the woman writer's strategies for achieving this reinvention" (192). I discuss my considerable differences with Yaeger in connection with The Awakening in chapter one but point out here that, by viewing the sublime exclusively as a mode of writing or narrative strategy, Yaeger actually domesticates it. Her sublime, an arena for "intersubjective bliss" and "pleasures" (205), for "revelling" and ''ecstasy" (209), becomes a kinder, gentler sublime that isn't sublime at all, for it has become yet another version of the beautiful.

4. Strictly speaking the sublime is not an object but rather the subject's response to whatever it cannot grasp. As Jean-François Lyotard points out, "there are no sublime objects, only sublime feelings" ("The Interest of the Sublime," in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question , trans. Jeffery S. Librett [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993] 126).

5. The following passage from Burke's Enquiry demonstrates that race as well as gender offers a powerful metaphor through which to construct the sublime. To substantiate the claim "that the ideas of darkness and blackness are much the same" (and thereby refute Locke's view that "darkness is not naturally an idea of terror"), Burke tells the "very curious story of a boy, who had been born blind, and continued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he was then couched for a cataract, by which operation he received his sight . . . the first time the boy saw a black object it gave him great uneasiness; and . . . some time after, upon accidentally seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight." For Burke, the boy's horrifying vision is proof of the capacity of darkness to produce terror. The doubled figure of race and gender here functions as "natural" evidence of the innate connection between black objects, the feeling of terror, and the power of the sublime (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , ed. Adam Phillips [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 131-33). Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

6. By ideology I do not mean falsehood or false consciousness but rather, following Althusser, "a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representation (images, myths, ideas, or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society," in For Marx , trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977), 231. According to such a view ideology has the function of making socially constructed institutions and values seem "natural," and novels maybe said to both reflect and critique it in that they make visible the strategies by which we create social practices and attitudes. For especially germane discussions of ideology see Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 212-23; Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1978), 11-64; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 17-23, 58-102; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 57-68.

7. The "patriarchal subject" cannot be determined solely through recourse to sex, gender, race, or class. The term does not refer to an essential category but to a position that, consciously or not, respects, conserves, and seeks to perpetuate the effects of patriarchy, in whatever form they may appear.

8. Joseph Addison, The Spectator , ed. G. Gregory Smith (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981), 6:82.

9. Addison, The Spectator , 82-83.

10. "Longinus" on Sublimity , trans. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 7. Further references are to Russell's translation and occur in the text.

11. Hélène Cixous, "Sorties," in The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63-132, and "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms , ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 245-64; Julia Kristeva, "From One Identity To An Other," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , ed. Léon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 124-47, and La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974).

12. The word "modernism" coincides with both the emergence of the novel and the rise in popularity of theories of the sublime. The term was even coined by a novelist: according to the Oxford English Dictionary its first use occurs in 1737 in a letter from Swift to Pope: "The corruption of English by those Scribblers, who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms." If modernism is indeed "a usage, mode of expression, or peculiarity of style or workmanship, characteristic of modern times," then perhaps the novel and the sublime are two of its most representative symptoms. A suggestive remark by Thomas Weiskel ( The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976]) provides a clue to their affinity: "What created an immediate and growing audience for Longinus was the dilemma or anxiety of modernism. . . . What is new in modernism is an opposition, latent at first, but unavoidable, between authority and authenticity, between imitation, the traditional route to authentic identity, and originality, impossible but necessary. As a state of mind, modernism is an incurable ambivalence about authority" (8).

13. William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," in The Portable Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe , ed. W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 194-95.

14. John Keats, "Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818," in John Keats , ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 418-19.

15. Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism , ed. T. M. Raysor (London, 1936), 12.

16. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime , 158.

17. I am grateful to Helen Vendler for inviting me to reflect upon the differences between the feminine sublime and the sublime of nineteenth- and twentieth-century male poets. Although this brief discussion of Coleridge, Keats, and

Wordsworth does not perhaps answer her questions, I hope that my reading of Kate Chopin's The Awakening makes explicit the differences between Edna Pontellier's final walk into the sea and Giacomo Leopardi's "Thus in this immensity / My meditations drown: / And it is sweet to lose myself in this sea," or John Berryman's "it occurred to me / that one night, instead of warm pajamas / I'd take off all my clothes / and cross the damp cold lawn and down the bluff / into the terrible water and walk forever / under it out toward the island." I also thank her for calling my attention to these two poems. See Giacomo Leopardi, "The Infinite," in Leopardi: Poems and Prose , ed. Angel Flores, trans. Edwin Morgan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 61; and John Berryman, "Henry's Understanding," in Recovery/Delusions , etc. (New York: Dell, 1973), 53.

18. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1985), 230.

19. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), ix.

20. Jean-Luc Nancy ("The Sublime Offering," in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question , trans. Jeffery S. Librett [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993]) argues that "as for Kant, he had begun to recognize that what was at stake in art was not the representation of the truth, but—to put it briefly— the presentation of liberty . It was this recognition that was engaged in and by the thought of the sublime" (28; emphasis is original—as it is in quotations throughout this book, unless otherwise noted). Jean-François Lyotard ("After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics," in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991]) observes that the Kantian sublime involves a sacrifice that is crucial "for the final destination of the mind, which is freedom" (137).

21. The notion that the sublime provokes a crisis in categorization and representation recalls Marjorie Garber's discussion of the "category crisis" introduced in culture by the figure of the transvestite ( Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety [New York: Routledge, 1992], 16). Garber argues that "one of the most consistent and effective functions of the transvestite in culture is to indicate the place of what I call 'category crisis,' disrupting and calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances . . . by 'category crisis' I mean a failure of definitional distinctions, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another: black/white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave." In chapter two I examine the sublime in relation to transvestism and Burke's writings on the French Revolution. For the moment, it suffices to remark the important connection between the displacement of binaries and the function of the sublime.

22. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime , trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). See also "Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable," in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time , trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 124-28.

23. In this regard, see Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), especially her notion of "an ethical relation to otherness" in which "the subject does not seek to identify or categorize the object, but rather to let the object be in its difference," 148.

24. Bill Readings, "Sublime Politics: The End of the Party Line," Modern Language Quarterly (December, 1992): 411, 422-23.

25. Kate Chopin, The Awakening , ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), 8. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

1. For a brief discussion of the text's authorship and history see "Longinus" on Sublimity , trans. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), x-xii. See also the introduction and notes accompanying Russell's edition of the Greek text "Longinus" on the Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). Following Neil Hertz, I have also consulted another recent translation, G. M. A. Grube's Longinus on Great Writing (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). Unless otherwise noted all further references to Longinus are to Russell's translation and occur in the text.

2. Sappho's famous ode is preserved only through inclusion in Longinus' treatise. For a discussion of Longinus' and Boileau's treatment of the poem, see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho: 1546-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 84-87.

3. The reader may wish to read Sappho's ode in the original Greek and then compare Julia Dubnoff's literal translation of it with those provided by Russell and Grube:

That man to me seems equal to the gods,
the man who sits opposite you
and close by listens
to your sweet voice

and your enticing laughter—
that indeed has stirred up the heart in my breast.

For whenever I look at you even briefly
I can no longer say a single thing,
but my tongue is frozen in silence;
instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;
with my eyes I see nothing;
my ears make a whirring noise.

A cold sweat covers me,
trembling seizes my body,
and I am greener than grass.
Lacking but little of death do I seem.

But all must be endured since . . .

I have relied upon the versions of Sappho that appear in Russell and Grube primarily because these are the translations Neil Hertz cites, and it is his particular reading of Sappho's lyric that is the object of this critique.

4. Peter De Bolla interestingly defines sublime discourse as discourse that produces the very excessiveness it purports to describe ( The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 12): "the discourse of the sublime . . . is a discourse which produces, from within itself, what is habitually termed the category of the sublime and in doing so it becomes a self-transforming discourse. The only way in which it is possible to identify this newly mutated discursive form is via its propensity to produce to excess. . . . Hence the discourse on the sublime, in its function as an analytic discourse or excessive experience, became increasingly preoccupied with the discursive production of the excess."

5. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-20. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

6. Kate Chopin, The Awakening , ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), 15. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

7. Grube, Longinus on Great Writing , 4.

8. Suzanne Guerlac, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3. Guerlac emphasizes that the Longinian sublime is not "merely rhetorical" but "occurs as a force of enunciation determined neither by subjective intention nor by mimetic effect" (11). Thus, she argues, "the Longinian emphasis on the act of enunciation, and, in particular, the call for the dissimulation of figurative language, is incompatible with the mimetic structure of metaphor that is at the basis of the analyses of the romantic sublime" (194). Unlike Weiskel, for whom the sublime functions as a transcendent turn, Guerlac finds in the sublime "the site within the metaphysical tradition, and within the tradition of aesthetics, of resistance to mimesis, to metaphorical recuperation or 'resolution' and to aesthetics" (194-95); see 182-93 for Guerlac's discussion of Weiskel's Romantic Sublime (which I cite in note 12).

9. Ronald Paulson ("Versions of a Human Sublime," New Literary History 16, no. 2 [Winter 1985]: 427) points out that while "studies of the sublime, from Burke

to Monk and Hipple, used to focus on the enumeration of qualities in the sublime object or, more precisely, as they are reflected in the mind of the spectator . . . in the last decade, mediated by Nietzsche and Freud, by Harold Bloom and Thomas Weiskel, the focus has shifted to the agon between subject and object. The former is both/either a participant within a sublime confrontation and/or a spectator without."

10. Longinus' assumption that the sublime entails a transformation of conventional power relations anticipates Burke's famous dictum: "I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power" (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , ed. Adam Phillips [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 59).

11. See in particular Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). For Bloom the poet achieves sublimity only through overcoming the threat represented by the work of a "strong" precursor poet. In addition to Neil Hertz and Thomas Weiskel, recent proponents of this view include Marc W. Redfield who, in a provocative analysis of Fredric Jameson's notion of a postmodern sublime ("Pynchon's Postmodern Sublime," PMLA 104, no. 2 [March 1989]: 152), argues that the sublime moves "from a threatening diffusion of signs toward a more structured conflict, which enables a self to prop itself up, so to speak, on its own anxiety, reading the confirmation of its existence in the image of its threatened destruction." In the same issue of the PMLA , R. Jahan Ramazani reaffirms the view that the sublime entails confrontation and/or struggle between opposing forces ("Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime," PMLA 104, no. 2 [March 1989]: 164). Drawing upon the accounts of Hertz and Weiskel, he interprets the sublime "as a staged confrontation with death'' in which "the anticipation of death gives rise to a counterassertion of life." For Ramazani "death precipitates the emotional turning called the sublime, although theorists of the sublime often refer to death by other names, or by what Kenneth Burke terms 'deflections': nothingness, castration, physical destruction, semiotic collapse, defeat by a precursor, and annihilation of the ego. Death is the recurrent obsession for these theorists, from Longinus to Heidegger and Bloom."

12. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 5; Paul H. Fry, "The Possession of the Sublime," Studies in Romanticism 26, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 188.

13. Fry, "Possession of the Sublime," 189-90. See also Fry's discussion of Longinus' treatment of Sappho in "Longinus at Colonus," in The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 47-86.

14. A discussion regarding Longinus' commentary on Sappho occurs between Suzanne Guerlac and Frances Ferguson in New Literary History 16, no. 2 (Winter 1985), the issue entitled "The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations." Although their dispute does not directly engage Sappho's portrait of desire or Longinus' reaction to it, it does address a closely related topic: the status of the

subject and the kind of subjectivity at stake in the Longinian sublime. Does the sublime as represented by Longinus threaten or uphold the "unified self-identity of the subject" (275)? Guerlac and Ferguson propose very different answers, but both explore the question by examining Longinus' reading of Sappho.

In the article "Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime," Guerlac argues that theorists who emphasize pure "force of feeling" and who read Longinus from an exclusively phenomenological point of view "obscure a more radical force at work in the Longinian sublime, one which threatens the very notion of the subjectivity, or the unified self-identity of the subject" (275). Guerlac proposes to read On the Sublime "in terms of a 'rhetoric' of enunciation, instead of expression" in order to show that in the Longinian sublime "the subject of feeling, or the 'aesthetic' subject, is disrupted as well as the subject of certainty or the theoretical subject'' (275). The success of Guerlac's argument depends upon her discussion of Longinus' treatment of Sappho. She argues that what Longinus appreciates in the poem of Sappho "is clearly not a representation of unity, or of a unified body. The body is portrayed as broken, fragmented" (282). Rather, Longinus appreciates "the force of enunciation" through which Sappho is able to portray, and ultimately unify, the fragmented body. In Guerlac's view it is this "force of ennunciation which unifies these fragments, combin[ing] them into a single whole; embodying the text and the body—which now serves as a figure for the unity of composition of the text" (282). Although Guerlac appears to challenge the notion that the sublime implies (or helps construct) a unified subject, she does not question the prevailing view that the Longinian sublime entails the achievement of textual unity or dispute his reading of Sappho's lyric. Like Longinus', Guerlac's reading represses Sappho's emphasis on semiotic and erotic transport and reiterates the view that the sublime text functions as an antidote to division. Guerlac's "force of enunciation" repairs, not underscores, fragmentation and helps to maintain textual unity, if it is not indeed equivalent to it. For if the effect of figurative language is to give the semblance of unity, how can it follow that "there is no stable ground or truth or sincerity in the event of sublimity, which, through a force of enunciation, disrupts the stable identity of the subject" (285)? Unity remains the master trope whether the "force of enunciation" or the subject produces it; Guerlac now ascribes to it the unity and power previously ascribed to the subject.

Guerlac fails to notice precisely what Ferguson remarks in her elegant article, "A Commentary on Suzanne Guerlac's 'Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime'": "the capacity of rhetoric to produce what we might call 'a subjectivity effect'" (292). Ferguson argues that although Guerlac substitutes rhetoric for subjectivity and ascribes to the former the function previously reserved for the latter, nothing has really changed. What difference, Ferguson asks, does it make if the subject is divided when language is not? "Figurativity thus comes in aid of the notion of unity, in substituting for the shattered bodily unity a figurative wholeness. What is thus disconnected in one register is unified in another" (293). While it would be extremely interesting to know Guerlac's response to Ferguson's

remarks, particularly noteworthy in this context is that their debate centers on Longinus' reading of Sappho.

15. See Hertz, The End of the Line , 59.

16. For a study that explores the relation between gender, narrative, and a blocking agent or obstacle, see Theresa de Lauretis, "Desire in Narrative," in Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 103-57. De Lauretis not only argues that narrative structure depends upon a certain sadism but holds that the subject of narrative, or mythical hero, is invariably gendered as male, while the obstacle he encounters is female. According to de Lauretis, "the hero must be male regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female and indeed, simply, the woman" (118-19). By its very nature, then, "representation works to support the male status of the mythical subject'' (140).

17. Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (1935; rpt., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 6. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

18. According to Hertz, Weiskel locates in "the pre-Oedipal phases . . . the motivating power of the mathematical sublime, then sees them as rejoining a secondary system that is recognizably Oedipal and more clearly manifested in the dynamical sublime" ( The End of the Line , 52).

19. Writing seven years after "The Notion of Blockage," Hertz concludes The End of the Line with an essay entitled "Afterword: The End of the Line" in which he returns to the previously unexamined question of gender that haunted his discussion of Longinus. Here Hertz inquires: "What comes after the end of the line . . . at the end of the line, who pays? and why?" (223). His afterword, however, enacts the very pattern of scapegoating he has already described. A discussion of the relation between gender and scapegoating in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda prompts Hertz to ask "how her [the Princess'] gender, her being 'The Mother,' [is] linked to her serving as scapegoat?" (229). His response is that exorcism of the princess allows Daniel to put "a pre-Oedipal mother aside when he enters the symbolic order and takes his place under the sign of his Jewish grandfather" (230). Pursuing the discussion of the pre-Oedipal stage that he had raised all too briefly in connection with Weiskel, Hertz interprets Julia Kristeva's " L'abjet d'amour " in a way that parallels his readings of Longinus and Kant. Just as Hertz interprets Kant's mathematical sublime through a Wordsworthian grid of blockage and release, now he reads Kristeva's concept of the non-object or " abjet " in terms of the mechanism of scapegoating he finds at work in Daniel Deronda . Whereas Kristeva's formulation of the abjet might have been understood not only as abjection but as the more "radical flux and dispersion of the subject" that Hertz describes in the essay on "The Notion of Blockage," he interprets it as a triumphant staving off of chaos, an instant in which the infant links itself with the paternal function. The casting out of the vide , of "that which could have been a chaos and which now begins to become an abject " (232), enables the infant's first sense of selfhood, and the movement Kristeva traces becomes a corollary to that

at work in Daniel Deronda : "the casting out of the Princess, her abjection, is intended not to collapse the distance between author and surrogate, but to stabilize it as a chosen separation and thus to ground the multiple gestures of mimesis that make up the novel" (233). The Oedipal moment of casting out differences and achieving an identification with the father, previously described as identical to the structure of the sublime, Hertz now locates at the heart of Kristeva's description of the pre-Oedipal stage. In Hertz's reading of Kristeva, the mother comes to serve the name and law of the father, recreating the same "end of the line scenario" that characterizes Hertz's treatment of Sappho. Once again Hertz evokes the possibility of an excess that cannot "be brought back home to the Father" but does so only the better to return it to him.

20. The phrase "language of the unsayable" derives from the title of the book edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

21. "Selections from The World As Will and Idea ," Book 111, section 39, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger , ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York: The Modern Library, 1964), 464.

22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment , section 29, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 130. Subsequent references are to this edition and will appear in the text, along with German terms from the original ( Kritik der Urteilkraft , ed. Wilhelm Weischedel [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974]) that I add to show that Kant talks about sacrifice and uses concepts of power and subordination to explain the function of the imagination. For an intriguing discussion of this passage, see Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects , ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 132-35.

23. For an insightful discussion of the oceanic sublime, see Steven Z. Levine, "Seascapes of The Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling," New Literary History 16, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 377-400.

24. Gerald L. Bruns, "Disappeared: Heidegger and the Emancipation of Language," in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory , ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 127-28.

25. Theodore W. Adorno, cited in Bruns, "Disappeared," 144.

26. Edna's "flash of terror" of course recalls Burke's dictum that "terror is in all cases whatsoever either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime" ( Enquiry , 54). We focus upon Burke's sublime and his notion of terror in the following chapter.

27. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Sex Changes, vol. 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 98. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

28. Some of the influential readings of The Awakening that do not discuss the ocean's role or "voice" include Margaret Culley, "Edna Pontellier: 'A Solitary Soul,'" in her edition of The Awakening , 224-28; Anne Goodwin Jones, "Kate Chopin: The Life Behind the Mask," in Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 135-82; Susan J. Rosowski, "The Novel of Awakening," Genre 12 (Fall 1979): 313-32; George M. Spangler, "Kate Chopin's The Awakening : A Partial Dissent,'' Novel 3 , no.3 (Spring 1970): 249-55; Margit Stange, "Personal Property: Exchange Value and the Female Self in The Awakening ," Genders , no. 5 (July 1989): 106-119: Ruth Sullivan and Stewart Smith, "Narrative Stances in Kate Chopin's The Awakening ," Studies in American Fiction 1, no. 1 (1973): 62-75; Lawrence Thornton, " The Awakening : A Political Romance," American Literature 52, no. 1 (March 1980): 50-66; Paula A. Treichler, "The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening : A Linguistic Analysis," in Women And Language in Literature and Society , ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 239-57; Otis B. Wheeler, "The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier," Southern Review 11, no. 1 (1975): 118-128; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "Thanatos and Eros," in Culley's edition of The Awakening , 206-18. For a reading that considers Chopin's treatment of Whitman, see Elizabeth Balken House, " The Awakening : Kate Chopin's 'Endlessly Rocking' Cycle," Ball State University Forum 20, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 53-58. For an overview of critical responses to The Awakening prior to 1977, see Priscilla Allen, "Old Critics and New: The Treatment of Chopin's The Awakening ," in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism , ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 224-38.

29. Dale Bauer, "Kate Chopin's The Awakening : Having and Hating the Tradition," in Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 148. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

30. Patricia Yaeger, "'A Language Which Nobody Understood': Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening, " Novel 20, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 204. Subsequent references will be in the text.

31. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute , trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1961), prop. 7, 151.

33. "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" in The Postmodern Condition , trans. Regis Durand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. See also Lyotard's discussion of aesthetic pleasure and the sublime, "Complexity and the Sublime," in Postmodernism: ICA Documents , ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 19-26. Here Lyotard emphasizes that "with the idea of the sublime, the feeling when faced with a work of art is no longer the feeling of pleasure, or not simply one of pleasure. It is a

contradictory feeling, because it is a feeling of both pleasure and displeasure, together. . . . With the sublime, the question of death enters the aesthetic question" (22).

34. For Lyotard's discussion of the relation between an aesthetics of the sublime and questions of representation, see "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," in The Lyotard Reader , ed. Andrew Benjamin, trans. Lisa Liebmann (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 196-211. Lyotard's most comprehensive discussion of Kant's sublime occurs in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime , trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). On Lyotard's notions of representation and postmodernity, see Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), 53-85; and David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987), 155-84.

35. Walter Benn Michaels, "The Contracted Heart," New Literary History 21, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 498. Subsequent references will be in the text.

36. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition , 81.

37. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land , 97.

38. Jane P. Tompkins, "The Awakening: An Evaluation," Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1976): 24.

1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

2. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905; rpt., New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 26. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

3. James T. Boulton points out that with Burke the theory of the sublime undergoes important changes. Whereas in the earlier part of the eighteenth century "the sublime is essentially a style of writing, with Burke it becomes a mode of aesthetic experience found in literature and far beyond it. . . . In the time of Boileau 'sublime' is a term primarily for literary critics; later, sublimity is a subject for psychological study by philosophers interested in the relation between human emotion and sublime objects" (introduction to Burke's Enquiry [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958], xlvii).

4. According to Boulton, Burke's wish to dispel uncertainty and confusion and to show that taste operates by fixed and universal principles "illustrates the eighteenth century inclination to discover immutable laws governing human life and activities. In the Newtonian tradition Burke looks for—and finds—immutable laws governing taste" (ibid., xxviii).

5. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 128. I am indebted to Mitchell for emphasizing the transformative and speculative qualities of Burke's sublime. I disagree, however, with his view that the discrepancy between Burke's early and late work may be explained by finding "two theories of the sublime in the Enquiry . One is based on imagination, the mechanics of sensation and controlled chiefly by visual and

pictorial metaphors . . . the other, which emerges most clearly in the final section of the Enquiry , is resolutely anti-visual, anti-pictorial, and employs the terminology of feeling, sympathy, and customary association or substitution" (139-40). Arguing that two theories of the sublime lie dormant in the Enquiry allows Mitchell to distinguish between "the false, speculative French sublime and the true English verbal sublime" (140), and therefore to resolve the difference between Burke's aesthetic and political preferences. However, Mitchell's insistence upon two versions of Burke's sublime flies in the face of those very features he has so brilliantly emphasized as characteristic of it. In so far as the sublime involves the "union of two opposites" and implies "the transformation of one into the other in the extremes" (128), it undercuts and blurs the difference between the "true, verbal" and ''false, speculative" forms of the sublime Mitchell attempts to discern. If, on the one hand, Mitchell identifies Burke's sublime as the principle of the transformation of opposites, he cannot, on the other, divide the sublime into two opposing aspects, for that would be to ignore what he has taken pains to observe: the ability of the sublime to unite opposites, not produce them.

6. The self-contradictory character of Burke's sublime and its capacity to occupy simultaneously both terms of any opposition is reflected by the reputation Burke acquired after his death, for he has been identified with both sides of the political spectrum. What C. B. MacPherson has called "the Burke problem" is, as Phillips observes, "that his writings have been used to support diametrically opposed political positions" (xiii). He has, for example, been claimed as a champion of conservativism and great defender of the traditional hierarchical society (for his counterrevolutionary writings) and, equally, as a spokesman for the liberal cause (for his case against the British government's policy in the American colonies and against the activities of the East India Company). The question MacPherson attempts to resolve is how "the same man [could] be at once the defender of a hierarchical order and the proponent of a liberal market society?" ( Burke [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980], 4).

7. Donald E. Pease, "Sublime Politics," Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (Spring/Fall 1984): 259. Although Pease describes the sublime as "a sheer force" that "unsettles every locus of power" and "spontaneously surpasses every designation intended to locate it" (263), he nonetheless holds that "despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has, in what we could call the politics of historical formation, always served conservative purposes" (275). Pease begins by remarking the sublime's transformative capacities, its "power to make trouble for categorizing procedures," but proceeds to divide it into an implicitly positive "power to bring a new form into being" that faces an explicitly negative "destructive power . . . to disrupt any existent form," as if the sublime's very metamorphic power marks it as negative and threatening. I would argue that the tendency to divide the sublime into positive and negative forms is itself a means of defending against its transformative force. Pease's article responds to Hayden White's "Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation," in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 58-82, in which White examines "the domes-

tication of history effected by the suppression of the historical sublime" (75). White's genealogy emphasizes the repression of a specifically historical sublime and its consequences for the politics of interpretation: he traces the persistent demotion of the sublime in favor of the beautiful in eighteenth and nineteenth century historiography from Burke through Hegel and Marx. According to White, "Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France can be seen as one of the many efforts to exorcise the notion of the sublime from any apprehension of the historical process, so that the 'beauty' of its 'proper' development, which for him was given in the example of the 'English Constitution,' could be adequately comprehended" (68). There is, I think, a very real affinity between White's wish to recover "the historical sublime that bourgeois historiography repressed in the process of its disciplinization" (81) and my own wish to uncover a feminine sublime that traditional theories of the sublime repress. From a feminist point of view the sublime's ability to call into crisis existing categories and power-relations not only underwrites the possibility of critique but aligns the sublime with a politically radical perspective, for it entails a permanent receptivity to interrogating and reconfiguring existing configurations of power.

8. My epigraph, "Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations," is from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France , ed. J. G. H. Pocock (Indiana: Hackett, 1987), 55. All further references to the Reflections are to this edition and occur in the text.

9. For a discussion of Burke's notions of the beautiful and the sublime in relation to the politics of pleasure see Fredric Jameson, "Pleasure: A Political Issue," in The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 2:61-74.

10. In A Vindication of the Rights of Man , ed. Eleanor Louise Nicholes (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1960), Mary Wollstonecraft responds to Burke's Reflections by invoking and criticizing his categories of the beautiful and the sublime. She is particularly critical of his notion of the beautiful, for she believes that it enslaves women by encouraging them to be frivolous and weak. She writes, for example: "if virtue has any other foundation than worldly utility, you have clearly proved that one half of the human species, at least, have not souls; and that Nature, by making women little, smooth, delicate, fair creatures, never designed that they should exercise their reason to acquire the virtues that produce opposite, if not contradictory, feelings. . . . If we really wish to render men more virtuous, we must endeavor to banish all enervating modifications of beauty from civil society" (113-15). See also Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 81-82; and Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 51-52.

11. Neal Wood, "The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke's Political Thought," Journal of British Studies 4 (1961): 42; Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language , 60; Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 36. See also Peter Hughes, "Originality and Allusion in the Writings of

Edmund Burke," Centrum 4, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 32-43; and Paulson, Representations of Revolution , 57-87.

12. Burke's critique of the excesses of British colonialism in India employs the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime in much the same way as do his counterrevolutionary writings. Burke's attack on Warren Hastings, for example, became the model for his later attack on the Parisian Jacobins. As Isaac Kramnick points out in The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 126-42, "Hastings signified more than just the bourgeois principle run wild for Burke; he also represented irresponsible, aggressive, and conquering masculinity. Hastings personified for Burke the consequence of unleashed and unrepressed sexuality" (134). Burke also delighted in dwelling upon the sexual horrors Hastings and his minions inflicted upon aristocratic Indian women, particularly the princesses of Oudi in the years of 1782 and 1783. In these writings, Hastings and the Jacobins enact a perverted version of the sublime while the Indian princesses, like the queen of France, exemplify the beautiful. For discussions of Burke's Indian writings see especially Kramnick's book; and Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India , 24-74. For a comprehensive overview of the impeachment proceedings, see P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). For Burke's India writings see the Bohn Standard Library edition of The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (London, 1877-1884), vols. 4-5; and Burke's "Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill" in The Complete Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke , vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1866). Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from Burke's works are noted merely as Works and will refer to the Bohn edition.

13. W. J. T. Mitchell, "Visible Language: Blake's Wond'Rous Art of Writing," in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism , ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 50.

14. For another account of Burke's notion of the sublime in relation to the social, see Frances Ferguson, "Legislating the Sublime," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics , ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 128-47. Here Ferguson examines the variety of ways in which Burke's "sublime, though repeatedly set apart from the claims of society, nonetheless reinforces them" (133), and discusses the role of the sublime in the Enquiry and the Reflections .

15. House of Commons, 11 April 1794; in Speeches of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (1816), 4:164-65.

16. Works , 5:155.

17. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 54-55.

18. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India , 43.

19. Thomas De Quincey, "A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature in Its Foremost Pretensions," in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey , ed. David Masson (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 10:300-301.

20. For further discussion of Burke's views of sexual difference and the gendering of his aesthetic categories see Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language , 49-60; Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke , 93-97, 121-25; and Mitchell, Iconology , 124-42.

21. Works , 3:437.

22. Works , 5:256.

23. J. G. A. Pocock, editor's introduction to Reflections on the Revolution in France , xxxvii.

24. Burke's professed dislike of speculation did not prevent him from indulging his own taste for it. In 1766 he made a great deal of money in the stock market; in 1768 he purchased an estate near London that cost 20,000 pounds, money that was acquired mainly by speculation in stocks and mortgages.

25. Works , 1:4. Burke continued to underscore the dangers of imaginative activity throughout his career. In the "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" (1791), he wrote: "There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from Feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination" ( Works , 3: 98-99).

26. Christopher Reid, "Language and Practice in Burke's Political Writing," Literature and History , no. 6 (Autumn 1977): 204.

27. Works , 2:29-30. "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" also contains some striking examples of Burke's hatred of gambling, reminiscent of his diatribe against "a nation of gamesters" in the Reflections . In a particularly exemplary passage Burke writes: "Do we not see how lightly people treat these fortunes, when under the influence of the passion of gaming? . . . There is also a time of insecurity, when interests of all sorts become objects of speculation. Then it is, that their very attachment to wealth and importance will induce several persons of opulence to list themselves, and even to take a lead, with the party which they think most likely to prevail, in order to obtain to themselves consideration in some new order or disorder of things. . . . Those who speculate on change, always make a great number among people of rank and fortune, as well as amongst the low and the indigent'' ( Works , 3:107-8).

28. I am greatly indebted to Peter de Bolla's discussions of the diverse relationships between the notion of excess and the theory of the sublime which he develops in his study The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 4-72, 281-300. My own arguments concerning the interconnections between speculation, financial and discursive excess, and the sublime owe much to de Bolla's view that the function of the discourse on the sublime is not only to describe sublime experience, but also to create "the experiential possibility for sublime sensations" (120).

29. Although Burke insists upon the humiliating violation of the nearly naked queen, there is no evidence of Marie Antoinette fleeing "almost naked" (62). According to Kramnick, "the eyewitness account of that night by Madame de la Tour du Pin, an aristocratic Irish lady-in-aid to the queen, is at variance with Burke's account. The queen's guard seems not to have been killed, and the

incident seemed to most courtiers to have been the product less of Jacobin frenzy than of the incompetence of the guards who it was suggested were part of an internal plot orchestrated by Duc D'Orleans. Madame du Pin also notes that the women in the court had been forewarned of potential danger and had not undressed that evening. She makes no reference to the queen's lack of clothing when fleeing, a fact one might expect to be of some importance for an eyewitness chronicler. It would seem that no one even saw the queen flee by the little passage which linked her bedchamber to the king's." Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke , 152. See also Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin , ed. Felice Harcourt (London: Harvill Press, 1969), 131-37.

30. Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke , 151.

31. On feminine transvestism as a metaphor for political chaos, see Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language , 56-57; Mitchell, Iconology , 43-44; and Paulson, Representations of Revolution , 81.

32. In A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), Burke employs a similar metaphor to emphasize that monstrosity is gendered as feminine, but here the revolutionary "furies of hell" of the Reflections have been replaced by the revolutionary "harpies of France": "The Revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and Hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally 'all monstrous, all prodigious things,' cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighboring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenoues birds of prey (both mothers and daughters), flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravanged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal." Particularly striking is Burke's conviction that female mutation, if not femininity itself, lies at the origin of confusion of sexual difference as a figure for political and moral anarchy, confusion is, in the Enquiry , one of the attributes of the sublime ( Works , 5:120).

33. For a discussion of female kinship in the novel, see Elaine Showalter, "The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth ," Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 133-49.

34. The commodification of Lily's beauty and the pervasive power of the marketplace has been the source of much critical speculation. See Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 28-43; Wai-Chee Dimock, "Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth ," in Edith Wharton: Modern Critical Views , ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 123-34; Judith Fetterly, "'The Temptation to be a Beautiful Object': Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth ," Studies in American Fiction 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1977): 200-207; Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 86-94; Barbara Hochman, "Representation and Exchange in The House of Mirth ," Novel 24, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 135-58; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1988), 88-93; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 225-34; Robert Shulman, "Divided Selves and the Market Society: Politics and Psychology in The House of Mirth ," Contemporary Literature II, no. 1 (1985): 10-18; Carol Wershoven, The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton (London: Associated University Press, 1982), 43-49; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115-31.

35. Jean François Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," in The Lyotard Reader , ed. Andrew Benjamin, trans. Lisa Liebmann (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 209. Lyotard also discusses Burke's Enquiry in this essay, 204-6.

36. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic , 212. Anglo-American critics such as Eagleton and Jameson have turned to the sublime in order to preserve and reorient Marxist cultural criticism and analysis: see, for example, Jameson's discussion of a "postmodern or technological sublime" in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 34-54, and "Regarding Postmodernism: A Conversation with Fredric Jameson," in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism , ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). For another account of the sublime as ideology, see Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). For Zizek "the sublime is an object in which we can experience this very impossibility, this permanent failure of the representation to reach after the Thing . . . the Sublime is therefore the paradox of an object which, in the very field of representation, provides a view, in a negative way, of the dimension of what is unrepresentable" (203). The ideology of the sublime object thus resides in its capacity to represent lack, understood by Zizek as castration and pure negativity.

37. Here I cite The Complete Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1866), 10:450.

38. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , in Karl Marx: Early Writings , trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 358. Here Marx writes: "The quantity of money becomes more and more its sole important property. Just as it reduces everything to its own form of abstraction, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to something quantitative. Lack of moderation and intemperance become its true standard." For Marx, as for Burke, money is a form of monstrous sublimity. Gary Shapiro points out that "Marx's extensive notes on the aesthetics of F. T. Vischer, made just a year or two before the completion of Herr Vogt , show him taking an explicit interest in Vischer's account of the sublime. Vischer's discussion of the measureless seems to have helped Marx to formulate the economic categories of Capital and other later writings. Capital has a tendency toward a continuous and monstrous development in which every boundary of measure is left behind. Like the Kantian mathematical sublime, capital can expand indefinitely as an objective and threatening presence." Gary Shapiro, "From the Sublime to the Political: Some His-

torical Notes," New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 16, no. 2 (1985): 228.

39. Dimock, "Debasing Exchange," 123.

40. On "the tyranny of beauty" see Frances Ferguson's discussion of Burke's Enquiry in Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 37-54.

41. The implications of the tableaux vivants scene have been much discussed. See Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 185-86; Fryer, Felicitous Space , 75-80; Hochman, "Representation and Exchange in The House of Mirth ," 151; Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism , 94-98; Michaels, The Gold Standard , 239-44; Bruce Michelson, "Edith Wharton's House Divided," Studies in American Fiction 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1984): 212-15; Showalter, "The Death of the Lady (Novelist)," 140; Wershoven, The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton , 49-50; and Wolff, A Feast of Words , 125-26.

42. In "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" Burke describes Reynolds as "the excellent and philosophical artist, a true judge, as well as a perfect follower of nature" ( Works , 3:114).

43. I take issue with Wai-Chee Dimock, who finds Lily's gestures of resistance "eloquent" and "heroic," but "ultimately futile, ultimately contained, absorbed, and exploited by the very system against which it is directed" ("Debasing Exchange," 134). Although Dimock agrees that in repaying Trenor and burning Selden's letters Lily challenges ''the very basis of exchange," she concludes that "as every reader must recognize, defiance of this sort is ultimately unavailing. The exchange system can easily accommodate rebellion like Lily's" (131). For Dimock, the very nobility of Lily's action "lies in its fruitlessness, in its utter lack of material consequence, in its erasure from history. . . . Morality, in The House of Mirth , provides no transcendent language, no alternative way of being, but feeds directly into the mechanism of the marketplace. Lily's rebellion, which appeals to and presupposes a transcendent moral order, is doomed for that very reason" (135).

In contrast to Dimock, I argue that resistance is possible only from a position within that which one resists. That there is no outside of the marketplace does not preclude effective resistance, nor imply that everything that occurs within it possesses equal value. That a capitalist society can assimilate actions such as Lily's does not imply the futility of such gestures, but rather underscores their importance and necessity, for acts of resistance can occur only within the context of the power-relations they also contest. To charge, as does Dimock, that acts such as Lily's are "ultimately futile," a challenge "in spirit but not in fact" (131) is, I think, to invalidate and overlook the possibility of individual acts of resistance in favor of an idealized view of the political domain. Such a view would mistakenly envision political or public actions as unassimilable in a way that individual ones are not, and would allow us to believe in a realm that could successfully escape recuperation. As I have argued, Lily Bart creates a kind of value that neither

transcends the marketplace nor is determined by it, and the novel's political function resides in its ability to make its readers cognizant of the conditions of the marketplace at the same time that it elaborates an alternative course of action. Far from being "futile," Lily's resistance makes legible the normativizing practices of her society and in so doing confronts the reader with her responsibility for that involvement. Rather than presuppose a "transcendent moral order," as Dimock would have it, Lily's "ethics of risk" resists the ethos of exchange by presenting a radical revision of it, one whose only ground lies in its recognition of the need for perpetual improvisation.

44. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), 207.

45. I contest Walter Benn Michaels's view that Lily Bart exemplifies and embodies market capitalism. Perhaps because Michaels identifies capitalism with "the principle of mutability, the omnipresence and irreducibility of risk" ( The Gold Standard, 76), he interprets Lily's passion for risk as "an expression of her passion for the market" (230). I argue that successful capitalists do not thrive on taking chances, as Michaels would have it, but rather succeed precisely by minimizing them, and that Lily's passion for chance is not a sign of her commitment to capitalism but evidence of her resistance to it. As Michaels himself observes, "the skillful gambler seeks to minimize risk by exerting a certain control" (230), which is just what Lily, by the end of the novel, no longer attempts—not because she lacks a gambler's skill but because she rejects an economy in which success depends upon eradicating risk. Michaels ignores Lily's development during the course of the novel. I agree that at the beginning Lily's "distaste for the commerce of Wall Street in fact express[es] her complete commitment to the practices of speculation" (228) and that here she does indeed personify the marketplace, yet by the end she affirms a version of speculation that its other practitioners eschew and thereby offers an alternative to it. Successful speculators such as Bertha, Trenor, and Rosedale love profit, not risk; and they, not Lily, are the characters who do indeed embody the marketplace in The House of Mirth . In distinct contrast to these figures, Lily resists the market she earlier embodied and does so precisely through her affirmation of risk.

46. Dimock, "Debasing Exchange," 127.

47. Lily's commitment to loss anticipates and enacts Georges Bataille's notion of dépense (expenditure), whose goal is not gain or conservation but infinite loss, a loss that offers no possibility of profit ("The Notion of Expenditure," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 , ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985]). Bataille holds that some examples of human comportment toward loss—"luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality)"—are all activities that "have no end beyond themselves" and cannot be accounted for by a logic that insists upon conservation and utility as axiomatic. The burning of Selden and Bertha's correspondence perfectly illustrates Bataille's notion of ex-

penditure: here "the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning" (118).

48. Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman and Jeffrey Mehlman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 60.

1. Henry James's remark that endings in fiction are never natural and that "we have, as the case stands, to invent and establish them, to arrive at them by a difficult, dire process of selection and comparison, of surrender and sacrifice" suggests that novelistic closure is obtained through the same sorts of sacrificial strategies at play in the Kantian sublime. See the preface "Roderick Hudson," in The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner's, 1962), 6.

2. A useful definition of patriarchy is that provided by Heidi Hartmann: "relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women." Quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3. Barbara Johnson suggests the following relation between patriarchy, misogyny, and language: "Gynophobia is structured like a language—indeed, more unsettling, language itself is structured like gynophobia. This does not mean—far from it—that women are excluded from language, but that the culpabilization of women is a necessary part of it" ("Response," Yale Journal of Criticism 1, no. 2 [Spring 1988]: 177).

3. Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 79.

4. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 78. For an illuminating discussion of the Observations , particularly with respect to Kant's sexual politics, see Susan Shell, "Kant's Political Cosmology: Freedom and Desire in the 'Remarks' Concerning Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime ," in Essays on Kant's Political Philosophy , ed. Howard Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), 87-119. I am grateful to James Engell for showing me this essay.

5. Kant's reading and use of the extensive eighteenth-century English literature on aesthetics is detailed in Otto Schlapp, Kant's Lehre vom Genie und die Entstehung der Kritik der Urteilskraft (Göttingen, 1901).

6. As Naomi Schor reminds us, Western philosophy "has, since its origins, mapped gender onto the form-matter paradigm, forging a durable link between maleness and form (eidos), femaleness and formless matter" ( Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine [New York: Methuen, 1987], 16).

7. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, 129.

8. See in particular "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes" (1925) and "Female Sexuality" (1931) in Sigmund

Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 183-211; and "Femininity" (1933) in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis , trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965).

9. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 179.

10. This may be the point to recall Eve Sedgwick's astute observation that "sex as such not only resembles and conveys but represents power, including—but not only—the power relations of gender" ( Between Man , 157).

11. On the relation between the rise of the novel as a literary genre and the emergence of the theory of the sublime, see my study "The Rise of the Sublime: Sacrifice and Misogyny in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics," Yale Journal of Criticism 5, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 81-99. There I point out that a comparison of publication dates of some of the most popular novels, translations of Longinus' Peri Hypsous , and commentaries on the sublime reveals a quite extraordinary overlap: Boileau's translation of Longinus, for example, first appeared in English in 1711 (subsequent editions were published in 1736 and 1752), just eight years before Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and close to the publication of Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); William Smith's translation, which was to become the standard, first appeared in 1739, remarkably close to the dates of Richardson's Pamela (1740-1741) and Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742); John Baille's Essay on the Sublime appeared in 1747, two years before Fielding's Tom Jones ; and Burke's Enquiry was published in 1757, close to the date of Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-1767). In the view of Samuel Holt Monk, whose work The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (1935; rpt., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) remains the definitive history, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) stands as the document that coordinates and synthesizes the aesthetic concepts that had been current throughout eighteenth-century England.

12. Monk's study The Sublime and Ian Watt's influential Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) shed light upon one aspect of the nature of the connection between the sublime and the novel, for Monk's account of the reasons why the sublime became so prominent is surprisingly consistent with Watt's analysis of the novel as a distinctive literary form: both reflect a modern preoccupation with the nature and development of individual identity, and the value and diversity of individual taste. According to Watt, a new emphasis on the primacy of the individual and a correlative privilege of the character's experience as the ultimate arbiter of reality are integral to the novel. This innovation in literary form is accompanied by a parallel development in philosophy, for the very notion of truth is reconceived as a primarily personal and therefore unique, rather than collective and tradition-bound, phenomenon. If the novel "is surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both the individual acts of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment," its technical characteristics also point to the aim that the novelist

of that period shares with the philosopher: "the production of what purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals" (Watt, Rise of the Novel , 117-18). Similarly, Monk argues that the eminence of the sublime in the eighteenth century was a result of the demand for "a theoretical defense of individualism in art" (Monk, The Sublime , iii, emphasis added). Longinus came into favor "because he could fill a need; he alone of the ancients could be used to support the idea of 'the liberty of writing'" (26-27). The emerging category of the individual and concern with the varieties of personal experience can be seen as a fundamental reason for the rise of both the novel and the sublime. Just as the former gives priority to the representation of individual identity and experience, so the latter reflects upon the individual's responses to the aesthetic object, and accounts for the subject's experience of pleasure or pain.

13. Watt's classic argument ties the popularity of the novel to the widespread growth of literacy and the expansion of the reading public to include the urban middle classes. But although Watt's argument turns on his attention to the "increasingly important female component" of the reading public, and although he acknowledges that "the majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women," his sole focus is upon woman's role as the consumer and not the producer of fiction. It is surprising that, while two of the most recent and influential studies of the novel challenge Watt, they do not take issue with this point of view. In The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) Michael McKeon argues that "the emerging novel internalizes the emergence of the middle class and the concerns that it exists to mediate" (27), but fails to ask if the concerns of the woman reader, not to mention those of the woman writer, might differ in significant respects from those of the masculine middle class that is his sole focus. And although Nancy Armstrong's brilliant Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) does make gender a crucial issue by showing that the construction of a new model of female subjectivity was central to the development of novelistic discourse—she argues that "one cannot distinguish the production of a new kind of feminine ideal either from the rise of the novel or from the rise of the new middle classes in England" (8)—Armstrong pays virtually no attention to eighteenth-century women writers; indeed, Austen's Emma is the only novel authored by a woman she discusses. Even though Armstrong echoes Woolf's view that, during this period, the fact that women ''suddenly began writing and were recognized as women writers strikes me as a central event in the history of the novel" (7), she does not question Watt's assumption that the eighteenth century woman's literary significance is due to her role either as the reader of fiction, or perhaps more important, as the heroine of novels written by men. Neither Armstrong nor McKeon attends to the connection between the emergence of the novel and women's new prominence on the literary scene. In A Room of One's Own ([New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957], 65) Virginia Woolf writes, "Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and

think of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write."

14. Although of vastly different social classes and careers, Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) and Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) are two examples of exceptionally talented women who were able to support themselves entirely by writing. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) and Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), who originally began to write fiction for pleasure, are also women who came to depend upon the income their novels produced. The more frequent occurrence, however, was for women to supplement their income through novel writing.

15. As B. G. MacCarthy was the first to point out ( Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel, 1621-1744 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1945], 43), "so consistently did women keep step with the advance in novel-writing that to trace their progress is to trace the progress of the novel itself." And as subsequent studies by Patricia Spacks and Jane Spencer attest, the growth of the novel parallels the emergence of a distinctly feminine literary tradition. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); and Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).

16. F. G. Black, The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Descriptive and Bibliographical Study (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1940), 8. Spencer, however, feels that his estimate is "a little high," pointing out that it "relies on always believing the 'By a Lady' claim, which is probably usually true but not an entirely reliable guide" (Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist , 33 n.7).

17. Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, x. Indeed, Spencer's main thesis is that "the gradual acceptance of the woman writer which took place during the eighteenth century considerably weakened this early link between women's writing and feminism. Once writing was no longer considered necessarily unfeminine the woman writer was no longer offering a resistance to male domination" (ibid.).

18. Advertisement in front of E. Boyd's Female Page (1737).

19. Susannah Rowson, Charlotte Temple (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6. (First American edition under the title Charlotte: A Tale of Truth , 1794.)

20. To assert a direct correlation between the emergence of the woman writer and of modern feminism is problematic, for at least until the end of the century, women's fiction by no means challenged patriarchal views of women's role and place. Indeed, as Ruth Perry observes ( Women, Letters, and the Novel [New York: AMS Press, 1980]): "Novels embellished and perpetuated the myths of romantic love needed to strengthen the new economic imbalances between men and women and necessary to make the lives of the depressed seem fulfilled. . . . They also carried the cultural message that women's lives were to be spent in idleness, daydreams, and romance" (x). And as Spencer points out, the novel played a decisive role in popularizing the ideal of "the pure woman," who ''never disturbed her usefulness as male property by any unruly desires of her own" ( Rise

of the Woman Novelist , 109). Perhaps because women's fiction was perceived as a threat, female novelists compensated by creating characters and plots that underscored feminine docility.

A tradition of feminist thinking was nonetheless beginning to emerge. Perry names Mary Astell as "the first English feminist," citing her Preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Letters (1724) as a contribution crucial to the development of English feminism. According to Perry, Astell pressed "for women's right to a real education, asking them to set aside their prejudices against a woman's writing and be pleased that a woman triumphs, and proud to follow in her train" ( Women, Letters, and the Novel , 16). And Spencer points out that in the last decade of the century feminism began to play a prominent role in women's fiction. She argues that "amid the ferment of radical ideas at the time of the French Revolution . . . the novel was used by writers on both sides of the political debate to promulgate their ideas, and among the radical novelists feminist ideas were given a central place" ( Rise of the Woman Novelist , 109). Accordingly, such novels as Elizabeth Inchbald's Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria: On the Wrongs of Women (1798) stand out as ''maverick productions of a short-lived revolutionary era" (137). It remains to underscore that these novels are the exception, not the rule.

21. Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel , 22.

22. Spacks, Imagining a Self , 60.

23. Eliza Haywood, The Rash Resolve (London, 1724), cited in Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist , 21. Spencer also points out that "the pure woman, for the eighteenth century, was one who never disturbed her usefulness as male property by any unruly desires of her own. It was in the novel that the ideal of pure femininity was most memorably expressed and popularly disseminated" (109-10).

24. Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist , 186.

25. Spacks, Imagining a Self , 57-58.

26. For another view see ibid., 63-71, 87-91. Spacks argues that even while female novelists of the period uphold the established system, they "find images and actions to express profound ambivalence" (63). According to Spacks, "the most successful women writers of the century richly examine what others only imply: the fact that society makes women dwell in a state of internal conflict with necessarily intricate psychic consequences" (89).

27. Greenblatt's theory of "self-fashioning" emphasizes the extent to which the construction of a self depends upon its successful differentiation from a hostile other. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.

28. For critical essays that relate Frankenstein to Kantian aesthetics see Marshall Brown, "A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel," Studies in Romanticism 26 (Summer 1987): 275-301; Frances Ferguson, "Legislating the Sublime," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics , ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 128-47; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 254-59.

29. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 224.

30. While there is no way to ascertain Shelley's intent with respect to Kant's third Critique , her comment upon learning that it was the custom at early dramatizations of Frankenstein to place a blank line next to the name of the actor who played the part of the monster, "this nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good," suggests considerable familiarity with Kant's theory of the sublime and a sophisticated and ironic attitude with respect to it (quoted in Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic , 241).

31. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting , trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 69.

32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus , ed. James Rieger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 52. Unless noted otherwise, subsequent citations in the text are to this edition of the 1818 version of the novel.

33. Frances Ferguson, discussing Frankenstein 's relationship to nuclear thinking and discourse in "The Nuclear Sublime," Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984), also points out that the Monster's "skin is too tight." According to Ferguson, ''The monster . . . is stretched too thin, as if his skin represented an unsuccessful effort to impose unity on his various disparate parts" (8-9).

34. For discussions of the gender of Frankenstein and his monster, see Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic , 213-47; Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 100-119; Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 99-109; Barbara Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 1-10; Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 155-73; U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters," and Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic," in The Endurance of Frankenstein , ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 77-87, 88-119; Anne K. Mellor, "Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein ," in Romanticism and Feminism , ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 220-32, and Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 114-42; Marc Rubenstein, "'My Accursed Origin': The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein ," Studies in Romanticism 15, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 165-94; William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgeny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Paul Youngquist, " Frankenstein : The Mother, The Daughter, and the Monster," Philological Quarterly 70, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 339-59.

35. Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," 8.

36. As Homans points out, "the demon will much later kill Elizabeth, just as the demon's creation has required both the death of Frankenstein's own mother and the death and violation of Mother Nature. . . . Victor has gone to great

lengths to produce a child without Elizabeth's assistance, and in the dream's language, to circumvent her, to make her unnecessary, is to kill her, and to kill mothers altogether" ( Bearing the Word , 103).

37. Jacobus, Reading Woman , 101.

38. Here I cite the 1831 edition of Frankenstein (New York: Collier MacMillan 1961), 31.

39. Longinus, On Literary Excellence , quoted in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden , ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 174.

40. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology , trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 163-65.

41. Again I cite the 1831 edition: "It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of Nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or, in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world" (32).

42. Jane Gallop, "The Monster in the Mirror: The Feminist Critic's Psychoanalysis," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis , ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 15.

43. Jacobus, Reading Woman , 85.

44. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic , 240.

45. I quote Dickinson's poem in full. All quotations of Jean Rhys's novel are from Good Morning, Midnight (1938; rpt., New York: Perennial Library, 1982) and occur in the text.

46. Mary Lou Emery, "The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys's Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and The Wide Sargasso Sea ," Twentieth-Century Literature 28 (1982): 418-19.

47. Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction" (1929) in Women and Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 52. Among Rhys's critics, both Judith Kegan Gardiner and Thomas F. Staley note Rhys's implied reference to Woolf. See Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism," Boundary 2 11, nos. 1-2 (Fall/Winter 1982-83): 244-46; and Thomas F. Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (London: MacMillan, 1979), 55-56.

48. Woolf, A Room of One's Own , 38-39.

49. Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight," 239.

50. Mary Helen Washington cites and expands Alice Walker's notion of the "suspended woman" in "Teaching Black-Eyed Susans : An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers," in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave , ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1982), 208-17.

51. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928; rpt., New York: New American Library, 1960), 27.

52. Woolf, Orlando , 33.

53. Rhys uses ellipses frequently. Square brackets around ellipses distinguish my deletions from those in the original text.

54. Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight," 248-49.

55. Staley, Jean Rhys , 97; and Elizabeth Abel, "Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys," Contemporary Literature 20, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 167.

56. Elgin W. Mellown, "Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys," Contemporary Literature 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1972): 467.

57. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys , Lives of Modern Women Series (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 66.

58. Abel, "Women and Schizophrenia," 167.

59. Arnold E. Davidson, "The Dark is Light Enough: Affirmation from Despair in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight ," Contemporary Literature 24, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 363.

60. Gardiner, "Good Morning, Midnight," 249.

61. Davidson, "The Dark is Light Enough," 349; and Abel, "Women and Schizophrenia," 167.

62. According to Thomas Weiskel ( The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 94), "the sublime moment recapitulates and thereby reestablishes the Oedipus complex, whose positive resolution is the basis for culture itself."

63. Davidson, "The Dark is Light Enough," 363.

64. Mary Poovey interrogates the idealist assumption that romantic love lies "completely 'outside' ideology" and that, as "an inexplicable, irresistible, and possibly even biological drive," it "flaunts the hierarchy, the priorities, the inequalities of class society" (" Persuasion and the Promises of Love," The Representation of Women in Fiction , Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1981, no. 7, ed. by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], 172). She points out that ''the fundamental assumption of romantic love—and the reason it is so compatible with bourgeois society—is that the personal can be kept separate from the social, that one's 'self' can even be fulfilled in spite of—and in isolation from—the demands of the marketplace." A materialist-feminist reading of the Rhysian canon underscores precisely this point.

65. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1984), 102.

66. Lorde, Sister Outsider , 123.

67. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972), 229. Atwood's injunction might be usefully juxtaposed with Fredric Jameson's criticisms of "left/liberal culture critiques." According to Jameson ( Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], 130), such critiques "suggest that cultural change and social renovation can be achieved by changes in thinking, or elevations in the level of consciousness . . . thereby rendering political activity unnecessary." As Atwood would certainly agree, developing the capacity to "refuse to be a victim" is a deeply political concern.

68. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 123-27; "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), 21-27; and the introduction to Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), in which Butler elucidates the notions of performance and performativity not as "primarily theatrical," "not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (12, 2).

1. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

2. The word "spook," a synonym for "ghost," is also used by whites as a derogatory term for Negroes. Dictionary of American Slang , ed. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, 2d ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 510.

3. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

4. While in Playing in the Dark Morrison explores representations of blackness in the white imagination, in a recent essay bell hooks examines the obverse ("Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination," in Cultural Studies , ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler [New York: Routledge, 1992]). She argues that for blacks whiteness is both synonymous with, and a symbol for, terror (which, as Burke tells us, is "the ruling principle of the sublime"). She also emphasizes that terror and whiteness are central to Beloved : "in Morrison's Beloved the memory of terror is so deeply inscribed on the body of Sethe and in her consciousness, and the association of terror with whiteness is so intense, that she kills her young so they will never know the terror" (345).

5. In "On the Backs of Blacks," Time Magazine , special issue "The New Face of America," Fall 1993, Toni Morrison continues to examine the strategies through which racism and "race-talk" create the appearance of unity. Here she maintains that "although U.S. history is awash in labor battles, political fights and property wars among all religious and ethnic groups, their struggles are persistently framed as struggles between recent arrivals and blacks. In race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American" (57).

6. Plato, The Republic , trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 74.

7. E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1911), 1:17.

8. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride , ed. and trans. J. Gwyn Griffiths (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1970), 145-6; chapters 15-16 are devoted to Isis' adventures while she searches for Osiris; chapter 9 mentions the inscription on Isis' temple at Saïs (131). For a description of the myth and cult of Isis and Osiris in relation to Plutarch's text, see Griffiths's commentary, 18-75.

9. James Frazer, The New Golden Bough , ed. Theodore H. Gaster (New York: New American Library, 1964), 388.

10. For a different interpretation of the Isis-Osiris myth, see Jean-Joseph Goux, "The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the 'Exchange of Women,'" trans. Maria Amuchastegui, Caroline Benforado, Amy Hendrix, and Eleanor Kaufman, Differences 4, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 40-75.

11. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 337.

12. Frazer, New Golden Bough , 143-44.

13. Graves, White Goddess , 232.

14. Ra had grown old and Isis wanted to become mistress of the earth and a mighty goddess, which she could do only by discovering the sun god's secret name. She took some of Ra's saliva, moistened dust and fashioned a snake with it, and laid it in his path. The serpent struck Ra as he passed by and the god suffered terribly from the poison. Ra realized that he was near death, but Isis promised to save him if he would reveal his name to her, and when he consented she immediately uttered the incantation that relieved and healed him. See Budge, Osiris , 188.

15. Jacques Derrida's analysis of the notion of the parergon in The Truth in Painting , trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) allowed me to develop this line of thinking. Derrida, however, does not remark the relation Kant establishes between "emotion," parerga , and the sublime. And while Derrida argues that "the whole frame of the analytic of the beautiful functions, with respect to that the content or internal structure of which is to be determined, like a parergon " (71), my point is that the sublime frames, and thus is parergonal to, Kant's "Analytic of the Beautiful."

16. Kant's comments about pure and mixed colors in the third Critique should be read in the context of his 1764 remarks about race in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime , trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). There he declares that: "The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that arises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. . . . The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort

of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible in human nature" (110-11).

17. Derrida, The Truth in Painting , 63.

18. Ibid., 39.

19. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), 129.

20. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 38.

21. Immanuel Kant, "On a Newly Emerged Noble Tone in Philosophy," Kant , ed. and trans. Gabriele Rabel (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), 285. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text. Immanuel Kant, "Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie," in Immanuel Kant's Werke , ed. Ernst Cassirer (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1914), 6:478-96.

22. Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., The Oxford Literary Review 6, no. 2 (1984): 15. Subsequent references to this essay will be in the text.

23. Sarah Kofman, like Derrida, also refers to Isis as "the goddess who murdered Osiris" ("The Economy of Respect: Kant and Respect for Women," Social Research 49, no. 2 [Summer 1982]: 400). Her discussion of Isis' appearance in Kant's "On a Noble Tone" not only repeats Derrida's error regarding Isis' actual role with respect to Osiris but, like Kant, she wants "to make of that phantom whatever [she] likes": according to Kofman, Isis is ''a phallic castrating mother" (400), the "personification of the law" (402).

24. Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers , 130, 172.

25. Barbara Johnson, in a lecture on African-American women's fiction at Harvard University in December 1990, discussed the significance of the missing "three" in the address of the house on Bluestone Road.

26. Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir , ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987), 106. Subsequent references to this essay are to this edition and occur in the text.

27. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and 'the jews' , trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 33.

28. Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, "A Conversation," The Southern Review 21, nos. 3-4 (1985): 585. Theodore Adorno's view that "some art works have the power to break through the social barrier they reach" has strong affinities with Morrison's emphasis upon the responsibility she feels to the people she writes about. In "A Conversation" she says, "the responsibility that I feel for the woman I'm calling Sethe, and for all of these people, these unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried, people made literate in art . . . I feel this enormous responsibility in exactly the way you describe the ferocity you felt when somebody was tampering with a situation that was gonna hurt" (585). And in "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation , ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 344, Morrison's

insistence upon the necessary politicality of her work resonates with Adorno's conviction that art can reach and break through social barriers: "If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn't about the village or community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political." Theodore W. Adorno might well describe Beloved as sublime, for in Aesthetic Theory , ed. Gretal Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), he defines as sublime "works that transcend their aesthetic shape under the pressure of truth content . . . they polarize spirit and material, only to unite them again" (280).

29. A further connection between Beloved and Their Eyes Were Watching God is suggested by the similarity of the stories of Sethe's and Nanny's escape from slavery. Both are badly whipped before fleeing, and both barely manage to reach a river. Moreover, Sethe is pregnant with Denver and is about to give birth, while Nanny has just delivered Leafy, Janie's mother, a week earlier. See Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial/Harper and Row, 1990), 16-19.

30. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume/New American Library, 1987), 5. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

31. Toni Morrison, "The Pain of Being Black," interview by Bonnie Angelo, Time Magazine , 22 May 1989, 120.

32. Mae G. Henderson, "Toni Morrison's Beloved : Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text," in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text , ed. Hortense J. Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991, 83.

33. As Valerie Smith points out ("'Circling the Subject': History and Narrative in Toni Morrison's Beloved ," in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present , ed. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah [New York: Amistad Press, 1993]), "by setting the novel during Reconstruction Morrison invokes the inescapability of slavery, for the very name of the period calls to mind the havoc and destruction wrought during the antebellum and war years" (345).

34. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 84. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

35. Cathy Caruth, editor's introduction to a special issue ("Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma") of American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 48, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 5.

36. The third revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987), current until May 1994, defined a traumatic event as one "that is outside the range of usual human experiences" (146). The 1994 edition now defines such an event as one in which "the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others" (4th ed., 427).

37. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1920-1922), 18:29, 13.

38. To cite but a few examples, Lyotard's discussion of the sublime in Heidegger and 'the jews' : "There is, however, a sublime feeling . . . this feeling bears witness to the fact that an 'excess' has 'touched' the mind, more than it is able to handle . . . the problematic of the unpresentable as such emerges, a long time ago, with the notion of the sublime" (32, 34); in "Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable": "the task of art remains that of the immanent sublime, that of alluding to an unpresentable which has nothing edifying about it, but which is inscribed in the identity of the transformation of 'realities,'" in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time , trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 128; and in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event : "With the esthetics of the sublime it can be argued that a kind of progress in human history is possible . . . it is indeed not a progress of the beautiful, of the taste of beauty, but of the responsibility to the Ideas of reason as they are negatively presented in the formlessness of such and such a situation which could occur" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 41.

39. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1910), 11:16.

40. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , 4th ed., 428.

41. Cathy Caruth, "Interview with Robert Jay Lifton," Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma , 160.

42. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 84. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

43. The phrase "nobody knows" appears frequently in Morrison's interviews and functions almost as a refrain in Beloved , as if to emphasize that the events about which she writes were (and perhaps still are) unwitnessed, unknown, and unseen. In a scene in which Beloved, Sethe and Denver ice-skate together, Morrison repeats the phrase "nobody saw them falling" (174-75) three times, and then changes the phrase to "nobody saw them fall" (175); Sethe recognizes Beloved as her lost daughter when she hears her humming a song Sethe herself had made up, a song "nobody knows . . . but me and my children" (176); and at the end of the novel, Morrison remarks upon the difficulty, or impossibility, of ''calling" Beloved: "Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name . . . how can they call her if they don't know her name?" (274).

44. Marsha Darling, "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison," The Women's Review of Books 5, no. 6 (March 1988): 5. Subsequent references to this interview will be in the text.

45. Smith, "Circling the Subject," 347.

46. Toni Morrison mentions that Henry Dumas, whose work she greatly admires, was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, but does not say whether or not

Sweet Home's name derives from Dumas' birthplace. See "City Limits, Village Values" in Literature and the Urban Experience : Essays on the City and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 41.

47. Toni Morrison, "Behind the Making of The Black Book ," Black World 23 (February 1974): 89. Subsequent references to this essay will be in the text.

48. Thomas LeClair, "'The Language Must Not Sweat': A Conversation with Toni Morrison," Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present , 375.

49. Le Clair, "The Language Must Not Sweat," 375.

50. More than one critic has remarked that Beloved retells the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Marilyn Sanders Mobley suggests that Sethe's "pain and mourning over her murdered child recall Demeter's pain in losing Persephone to the underworld." See Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1991), 174. For Marianne Hirsch, Sethe's story revives "the powerful mythic figure of Demeter . . . like the story of Demeter and Persephone, it is about a temporary, perhaps a cyclical, reunion between the mother and the daughter she lost" (8). "Maternity and Rememory in Toni Morrison's Beloved ," Representations of Motherhood , ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 97. I thank Marianne Hirsch for graciously allowing me to read her essay in typescript.

Classicists remind us that in many cases the myths of ancient Egypt stand behind those of Greece; some propose that the Demeter-Persephone legend itself is based upon the worship of Isis. J. Gwyn Griffiths, the editor and translator of Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride , points out that in the Greek tradition, "Demeter was the counterpoint of Isis." See Griffiths's edition of Plutarch, cited above, p. 43. And according to Joseph Fontenrose, the story of Isis' wanderings and visit to Byblos "is remarkably parallel to the tale of Demeter's wanderings in search of Persephone and visit to Eleusis." See Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 178.

51. Henderson, "Toni Morrison's Beloved ," 78.

52. Many of Morrison's critics agree that Beloved symbolizes the presence of the past. Marilyn Sanders Mobley points out that "when Paul D arrives at Sethe's home on 124 Bluestone, Denver seeks to frighten this unwanted guest away by telling him they have a 'lonely and rebuked' ghost on the premises. The obsolete meaning of rebuked—repressed—not only suggests that the ghost represents repressed memory, but that, as with anything that is repressed, it eventually resurfaces or returns in one form or another." See "A Different Remembering: Memory, History, and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved ," in Toni Morrison ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), 195. For Mae Henderson, "memory is materialized in Beloved's reappearance . . . her 'rebirth' represents . . . the uncanny return of the dead to haunt the living, the return of the past to shadow the present," "Toni Morrison's Beloved ," 72-73. According to Marianne Hirsch, Beloved "is memory itself. She is the story of slavery, the memory of slaves come back to confront the community whose future, until that

point, had been to 'keep the past at bay,'" "Maternity and Rememory," cited above, 105. And Valerie Smith observes that "as a ghost made flesh, she is literally the story of the past embodied. Sethe and Denver and Paul D therefore encounter not only the story of her sorrow and theirs; indeed, they encounter its incarnation," "Circling the Subject," 350.

53. Claudia Tate, "Toni Morrison," Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1983), 125.

54. Susan Bowers, " Beloved and the New Apocalypse," The Journal of Ethnic Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 64.

55. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1913-1914), 13:65.

56. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1914-1916), 14:243. Subsequent references to this essay are to this edition and occur in the text.

57. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1925-1926), 20:172.

58. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 79.

59. In this regard, see Celeste Marguerite Schenck's provocative essay on women's elegies and the masculine elegiac tradition in "Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (Spring 1986): 13-26. Here Schenck observes that elegy is "a resolutely patriarchal genre" (13), and argues that because men and women have different styles of mourning, their poetic expressions of loss also differ. Unlike the male elegist, who emphasizes his independence from the poetic master whose death he mourns (and celebrates), the female elegist affirms her refusal to mourn, her unwillingness to render up the dead. Whereas the masculine elegy is "a ritual hymn of poetic conservation during the course of which a new poet presents himself as heir to the tradition" (13), marking "a rite of separation that culminates in ascension to stature" (15), Schenck shows that female elegists construct poems based upon "attachment and recovery, rather than a severing of ties'' (19). I would argue that in Beloved Morrison transposes the concerns of elegy into a narrative domain. See also Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1-37; and Celeste Marguerite Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 1-18.

60. For discussions of the role of memory in Beloved , see Gayle Greene, "Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory," Signs 16, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 290-321; and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, "'Rememory': Primal Scenes and Construction in Toni Morrison's Novels," Contemporary Literature 31, no. 3 (1990): 300-323.

61. Barbara Hernstein Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," in On Narrative , ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 228.

62. Smith, "Circling the Subject," 351.

63. In Eric L. Santner's formulation ( Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990]), "mourning without solidarity is the beginning of madness" (26). Santner articulates a theory of mourning whiIch is able to find "in the harrowing labor of mourning . . . a source of empowerment" (11) and relates this new "rhetoric of mourning" to the project of postmodern theoretical discourses.

64. Bowers, " Beloved and the New Apocalypse," 68.

65. In "Circling the Subject," 351, Smith quotes an unpublished essay by Gwen Bergner.

66. Nellie McKay, "An Interview with Toni Morrison," Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present , 411.

67. Ibid.